International Society for Evidence-Based Health Care

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Teaching EBHC

The Critical thinking and Appraisal Resource Library

TestingTreatments now hosts the “Critical thinking and Appraisal Resource Library (CARL)”. Its learning resources are organised by Key Concepts essential to understanding fair comparisons of treatments and to help people evaluate claims about health care interventions. The library contains dozens of free to use resources, including ppt slide sets, lesson plans, videos, and articles. For example if you select “Undergraduate” as the target audience, you’ll find about 30 resources including ppt slides for relative vs absolute risk; videos explaining confidence intervals; and lesson plans for critical appraisal. See http://www.testingtreatments.org/category/key-concepts/

And please rate/comment on ones you try; and contact us if you have other free resources you would like to add.

Effective teaching strategies

A recent overview of systematic reviews shows that multifaceted, clinically integrated interventions, with assessment, can lead to improvements in knowledge, skills and attitudes as well as improve critical appraisal skills and behaviour. Lecture-based versus online teaching appears to give similar results. The authors conclude that EBHC teaching and learning strategies should focus on implementing multifaceted, clinically integrated approaches with assessment. More research is needed to evaluate minimum components for multifaceted interventions, assessment of medium to long-term outcomes, and implementation of these interventions.

Teaching Committee
The Society’s teaching committee is developing a number of areas to help those trying to develop and teaching EBHC within a health care program, including a curriculum statement, teaching materials, and workshops. The chair of the Curriculum Committee is Professor Craig Mellis – <craigm@med.usyd.edu.au> at Sydney University.

Curriculum
The Sicily Statement – published in BMC Medical Education 2005 decribed a curriculum for teaching EBHC. The curriculum based on teaching and testing the skills in the “5 steps” of EBM: question formulation, search, appraisal, application and self-evaluation . The statement is currently being revised and extended, and comments and suggestions are welcome.

Teaching Materials
The Society plans to develop free materials for members. Currently a number of good teaching tools and materials are available at the Oxford CEBM website, the McMaster website, and the KTClearinghouse in Toronto.